Early life
Althusser wrote two autobiographies, L'Avenir dure longtemps (The Future Lasts a Long Time) which is published in The United States as "The Future Lasts Forever," in a single volume with Althusser's other, shorter, earlier autobiography, "The Facts." They are not straightforward autobiographies and cannot be treated as such (at least without provisions) for purposes of strict biographical information.
Althusser was born in French Algeria in the town of Birmendreïs, near Algiers, to a pieds-noirs family. He was named after his paternal uncle who had been killed in the First World War. Althusser alleged that his mother had intended to marry his uncle and married his father only because of the brother's demise. Althusser also alleges that his mother treated him as a substitute for his deceased uncle, to which he attributed deep psychological damage.
Following the death of his father, Althusser moved from Algiers with his mother and younger sister to Marseilles, where he spent the rest of his childhood. He joined the Roman Catholic youth movement Jeunesse Etudiante Chrétienne in 1937. Althusser performed brilliantly at school at the Lycée du Parc in Lyon and was accepted to the elite École normale supérieure (ENS) in Paris. However, he found himself enlisted in the run-up to World War II, and like most French soldiers following the Fall of France Althusser was interned in a German POW camp. Here, his move towards Communism was to begin. He remained in the camp for the rest of the war, and this experience further contributed to his lifelong bouts of mental instability.
Health
After the war, Althusser was able finally to attend ENS. However, he was in poor health, both mentally and physically. In 1947 he received electroconvulsive therapy. Althusser was from this time to suffer from periodic mental illness for the rest of his life. The ENS was sympathetic however, allowing him to reside in his own room in the school infirmary. Althusser found himself living at the ENS in the Rue d'Ulm for decades, except for periods of hospitalization.
Post-War
In 1946, Althusser met Hélène Rytman, a revolutionary of Lithuanian-Jewish ethnic origin eight years older than he. She remained his companion, and eventually his wife, until her death, literally at his hands, in 1980.
Formerly a devout if left-wing Catholic, Althusser joined the French Communist Party (PCF) in 1948, a time when others such as Merleau-Ponty were losing sympathy for the party. That same year, Althusser passed the agrégation in philosophy with a dissertation on Hegel, which allowed him to become a tutor at the ENS.
De-Stalinisation
With the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, Nikita Khrushchev began the process of "de-Stalinisation". For many Marxists, including the PCF's leading theoretician Roger Garaudy and the pre-eminent existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, this meant the recovery of the humanist roots of Marx's thought, and the opening of a dialogue between Marxists and moderate socialists, existentialists and Christians. Althusser, however, opposed this trend, proffering a "theoretical anti-humanism" and sympathising with the criticisms made by the Communist Party of China, albeit cautiously and careful not to identify himself with Maoism. His stance during this period earned him notoriety within the PCF and he was attacked by its secretary-general Waldeck Rochet. As a philosopher, he was treading another path, which would later lead him to "aleatory materialism"; however, this did not stop him from defending Marxist orthodox thought in relation to his own position and work, such as during his 1973 reply to John Lewis.
Despite the involvement of many of his students in the events of May 1968, Althusser initially greeted these developments with silence. He was later to parallel the official PCF line in describing the students as victim to "infantile" leftism. As a result, Althusser was attacked by many former supporters. In response to these criticisms, he revised some of his positions, claiming that his earlier writings contained mistakes, and a significant shift in emphasis was seen in his later works.
1980s
On 16 November 1980, Althusser strangled his wife, Hélène Legotien (born Rytmann), to death, following a period of mental instability. There were no witnesses, and the exact circumstances are debated with some claiming it was deliberate, others accidental. Althusser himself claimed not to have a clear memory of the event, saying that, while he was massaging his wife's neck, he discovered he had strangled her. Althusser was diagnosed as suffering from diminished responsibility, and he was not tried, but instead committed to the Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital. Althusser remained in hospital until 1983. Upon release, he moved to Northern Paris and lived reclusively, seeing few people. He continued to work and write, but published little. A notable exception is his autobiography, L'Avenir dure longtemps, in which Althusser describes the killing (among other topics). He died of a heart attack on 22 October 1990 at the age of 72. Much of his post-1980 work has been published posthumously.
Althusser's earlier works include the influential volume Reading Capital, which collects the work of Althusser and his students on an intensive philosophical re-reading of Karl Marx's Capital. The book reflects on the philosophical status of Marxist theory as "critique of political economy," and on its object. The current English edition of this work includes only the essays of Althusser and Étienne Balibar, while the original French edition contains additional contributions from Jacques Ranciere, Pierre Macherey, and Roger Establet.
Several of Althusser's theoretical positions have remained very influential in Marxist philosophy. The introduction to his collection For Marx proposes a great "epistemological break" between Marx's early writings (1840—45) and his later, properly Marxist texts, borrowing a term from the philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard. His essay Marxism and Humanism is a strong statement of anti-humanism in Marxist theory, condemning ideas like "human potential" and "species-being", which are often put forth by Marxists, as outgrowths of a bourgeois ideology of "humanity". His essay Contradiction and Overdetermination borrows the concept of overdetermination from psychoanalysis, in order to replace the idea of "contradiction" with a more complex model of multiple causality in political situations (an idea closely related to Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony).
Althusser is also widely known as a theorist of ideology, and his best-known essay is Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation. The essay establishes the concept of ideology. Althusser's theory of ideology, as well as Marx, draws on Freud's and Lacan's concepts of the unconscious and mirror-phase respectively, and describes the structures and systems that enable the concept of the self. These structures, for Althusser, are both agents of repression and inevitable - it is impossible to escape ideology, to not be subjected to it.
Althusser's thought went through an evolution in his lifetime, and has been the subject of argument and debate, especially within Marxism and specifically concerning his theory of knowledge (epistemology).
The epistemological break
Althusser's contention was that Marx's thought had been fundamentally misunderstood and underestimated. He fiercely condemned various interpretations of Marx's works - historicism idealism, economism - on the grounds that they had failed to realise that with the "science of history", historical materialism, Marx had constructed a revolutionary view of social change. These errors, he believed, resulted from the notion that Marx's entire body of work could be understood as a coherent whole. Rather, Althusser held, it contains a radical "epistemological break". Though the works of the young Marx are bound by the categories of German philosophy and classical political economy, with The German Ideology (written in 1845) there is a sudden and unprecedented departure. This "break" represents a shift in Marx's work to a fundamentally different "problematic", i.e. a different set of central propositions and questions posed, a different theoretical framework. The problem (according to Althusser) is compounded by the fact that even Marx himself did not fully comprehend the significance of his own work, being only able to communicate it obliquely and tentatively. The shift can only be revealed by way of a careful and sensitive "symptomatic reading". Thus, it was Althusser's project to help us fully grasp the originality and power of Marx's extraordinary theory, giving as much attention to what is not said as to the explicit. He held that Marx had discovered a "continent of knowledge", History, analogous to the contributions of Thales to mathematics, Galileo to physics or, better, Freud's psychoanalysis, in that the structure of his theory is unlike anything posited by his predecessors.
Althusser believed that Marx's work was fundamentally incompatible with its antecedents because it was built on a ground-breaking epistemology that rejected the distinction between subject and object. In opposition to empiricism, Althusser claimed that Marx's philosophy, dialectical materialism, countered the theory of knowledge as vision with a theory of knowledge as production. On the empiricist view, a knowing subject encounters a real object and uncovers its essence by means of abstraction. On the assumption that thought has a direct engagement with reality, or an unmediated vision of a 'real' object, the empiricist believes that the truth of knowledge lies in the correspondence of a subject's thought to an object that is external to thought itself. By contrast, Althusser claims to find latent in Marx's work a view of knowledge as "theoretical practice". For Althusser, theoretical practice takes place entirely within the realm of thought, working upon theoretical objects and never coming into direct contact with the real object that it aims to know.. Knowledge is not discovered, but rather produced by way of three "Generalities": I, the "raw material" of pre-scientific ideas, abstractions and facts; II, a conceptual framework (or "problematic") brought to bear upon these; III, the finished product of a transformed theoretical entity, concrete knowledge. On this view, the validity of knowledge is not guaranteed by its correspondence to something external to itself; because Marx's historical materialism is a science, it contains its own internal methods of proof. It is therefore not governed by interests of society, class, ideology or politics, and is distinct from the economic superstructure.
In addition to its unique epistemology, Marx's theory is built on concepts - such as forces and relations of production - that have no counterpart in classical political economy. Even when existing terms are adopted - for example, the theory of surplus value that combines David Ricardo's concepts of rent, profit and interest - their meaning and relation to other concepts in the theory is significantly different. However, more fundamental to Marx's 'break' is a rejection of homo economicus, or the idea, held by the classical economists, that the needs of individuals can be treated as a fact or 'given' independent of any economic organisation. For the classical economists, such individual needs could serve as a premise for a theory explaining the character of a mode of production and as an independent starting-point for a theory about society. Where political economy explained economic systems as a response to individual needs, Marx's analysis accounted for a wider range of social phenomena in terms of the parts they play in a structured whole. Consequently, Marx's Capital has greater explanatory power than political economy, in that it provides both a model of the economy and a description of the structure and development of a whole society. In Althusser's view, Marx did not simply argue that humans' needs are largely created by their social environment and thus vary with time and place; rather, he abandoned the very idea that there could be a theory about what people are like that was prior to any theory about how they come to be that way.
Though Althusser steadfastly held onto the claim of its existence, he later asserted that the turning point's occurrence around 1845 was not so clearly defined, as traces of humanism, historicism and Hegelianism were to be found in Capital. He even went so far as to state that only Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme and some marginal notes on a book by Adolph Wagner were fully free from humanist ideology. In line with this, Althusser replaced his earlier definition of Marx's philosophy as the "theory of theoretical practice" with a new belief in the existence of "politics in the field of history" and "class struggle in theory". Althusser considered the epistemological break to be a process instead of a clearly defined event, the product of incessant struggle against ideology. The distinction between ideology and science or philosophy is thus not assured once and for all by the epistemological break.
Levels and practices
Because of Marx's belief that the individual is a product of society, it is, in Althusser’s view, pointless to try to build a social theory on a prior conception of the individual. The subject of observation is not individual human elements, but rather 'structure'. As he has it, Marx did not explain society by appealing to the properties of individual persons - their beliefs, desires, preferences and judgements - but rather defined society as a set of fixed "levels" and "practices". He uses this analysis to defend Marx’s historical materialism against the charge that it crudely posits a base (economic level) and superstructure (culture/politics) 'rising upon it' and then attempts to explain all aspects of the superstructure by appealing to features of the (economic) base (the well known architectural metaphor). For Althusser, it was a mistake to attribute this economic determinist view to Marx: much as he criticises the idea that a social theory can be founded on an historical conception of human needs, so does he critique the idea that economic practice can be used in isolation to explain other aspects of society. Althusser believed that both the base and the superstructure were interdependent, although he kept to the classic Marxist materialist understanding of the determination of the base 'in the last instance' (albeit with some extension and revision). The advantage of levels and practices over individuals as a starting point is that although each practice is only a part of a complex whole of society, a practice is a whole in itself in that it consists of various different kinds of parts; economic practice, for example, contains raw materials, tools, individual persons, etc. all united in a process of production.
Althusser conceives of society as an interconnected collection of these wholes — economic practice, ideological practice and politico-legal practice — which, although relatively autonomous, together make up one complex structured whole (social formation). In his view all levels and practices are dependent on each other. For example, amongst the relations of production of capitalist societies are the buying and selling of labour power by capitalists and workers. These relations are part of economic practice, but can only exist within the context of a legal system which establishes individual agents as buyers and sellers; furthermore, the arrangement must be maintained by political and ideological means. From this it can be seen that aspects of economic practice depend on the superstructure and vice versa. For him this was the moment of reproduction and constituted the important role of the superstructure.
Contradiction and overdetermination
An analysis understood in terms of interdependent levels and practices helps us to conceive of how society is organised, but also allows us to comprehend social change and thus provides a theory of history. Althusser explains the reproduction of the relations of production by reference to aspects of ideological and political practice; conversely, the emergence of new production relations can be explained by the failure of these mechanisms. Marx’s theory seems to posit a system in which an imbalance in two parts could lead to compensatory adjustments at other levels, or sometimes to a major reorganisation of the whole. To develop this idea Althusser relies on the concepts of contradiction and non-contradiction, which he claims are illuminated by their relation to a complex structured whole. Practices are contradictory when they "grate" on one another and non-contradictory when they support one another. Althusser elaborates on these concepts by reference to Lenin’s analysis of the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Lenin posited that in spite of widespread discontent throughout Europe in the early 20th century, Russia was the country in which revolution occurred because it contained all the contradictions possible within a single state at the time. It was, in his words, the "weakest link in a chain of imperialist states". He explained the revolution in relation to two groups of circumstances: firstly, the existence within Russia of large-scale exploitation in cities, mining districts, etc., disparity between urban industrialisation and medieval conditions in the countryside, and lack of unity amongst the ruling class; secondly, a foreign policy which played into the hands of revolutionaries, such as the elites who had been exiled by the Tsar and had become sophisticated socialists.
For Althusser, this example reinforces his claim that Marx's explanation of social change is more complex than to see it as the result of a single contradiction between the forces and the relations of production. The differences between events in Russia and Western Europe highlight that a contradiction between forces and relations of production may be necessary, but not sufficient, to bring about revolution. The circumstances that produced revolution in Russia, mentioned above, were heterogeneous, and cannot be seen to be aspects of one large contradiction. Each was a contradiction within a particular social totality, at a different structural level of social practice. From this, Althusser draws the conclusion that Marx’s concept of contradiction is inseparable from the concept of a complex structured social whole. In order to emphasise that changes in social structure relate to numerous contradictions, Althusser describes these changes as "overdetermined", using a term taken from Sigmund Freud. This interpretation allows us to account for how many different circumstances may play a part in the course of events, and furthermore permits us to grasp how these circumstances may combine to produce unexpected social changes, or "ruptures".
However, Althusser does not mean to say that the events that determine social changes all have the same causal status. While a part of a complex whole, economic practice is, in his view, a "structure in dominance": it plays a major part in determining the relations between other spheres, and has more effect on them than they have on it. The most prominent aspect of society (the religious aspect in feudal formations and the economic aspect in capitalist ones) is called the "dominant instance", and is in turn determined "in the last instance" by the economy. For Althusser, the economic practice of a society determines which other aspect of that society dominates the society as a whole.
Althusser's arguably more complex and materialist (than other Marxisms) understanding of contradiction in terms of the dialectic attempts to rid Marxism of the influence/vestiges of Hegelian (idealist) dialectics, and is a component part of his general anti-humanist position.
Ideological state apparatuses
Because Althusser held that our desires, choices, intentions, preferences, judgements and so forth are the products of social practices, he believed it necessary to conceive of how society makes the individual in its own image. Within capitalist societies, the human individual is generally regarded as a subject endowed with the property of being a self-conscious 'responsible' agent, whose actions can be explained by his or her beliefs and thoughts. For Althusser, however, a person’s capacity for perceiving him-/herself in this way is not innate or "given". Rather, it is acquired within the structure of established social practices, which impose on individuals the role (forme) of a subject. Social practices both determine the characteristics of the individual and give him/her an idea of the range of properties he/she can have, and of the limits of each individual. Althusser argues that many of our roles and activities are given to us by social practice: for example, the production of steelworkers is a part of economic practice, while the production of lawyers is part of politico-legal practice. However, other characteristics of individuals, such as their beliefs about the good life or their metaphysical reflections on the nature of the self, do not easily fit into these categories.
In Althusser’s view, our values, desires and preferences are inculcated in us by ideological practice, the sphere which has the defining property of constituting individuals as subjects. Ideological practice consists of an assortment of institutions called Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), which include the family, the media, religious organisations and, most importantly, the education system, as well as the received ideas that they propagate. There is, however, no single ISA that produces in us the belief that we are self-conscious agents. Instead, we derive this belief in the course of learning what it is to be a daughter, a schoolchild, black, a steelworker, a councillor, and so forth.
Despite its many institutional forms, the function and structure of ideology is unchanging and present throughout history; as Althusser states, "ideology has no history". All ideologies constitute a subject, even though he or she may differ according to each particular ideology. Memorably, Althusser illustrates this with the concept of "hailing" or "interpellation". He compares ideology to a policeman shouting "Hey you there!" toward a person walking on the street. Upon hearing this call, the person responds by turning around and in doing so, is transformed into a subject. The person being hailed recognizes him/herself as the subject of the hail, and knows to respond. Althusser calls this recognition a "mis-recognition" (méconnaissance) because it is working retroactively: a material individual is always-already an ideological subject, even before he is born. The "transformation" of an individual into a subject has always-already happened; Althusser acknowledges here a debt to Spinoza's theory of immanence. To highlight this, Althusser offers the example of Christian religious ideology, embodied in the Voice of God, instructing a person on what his place in the world is and what he must do to be reconciled with Christ. From this, Althusser draws the point that in order for that person to identify himself as a Christian, he must first already be a subject; that is to say, by responding to God's call, by following His rules, he is affirming himself as a free agent, the author of the acts for which he assumes responsibility. For Althusser, we acquire our identities by seeing ourselves mirrored in ideologies.
Further to the above, Althusser advances two theses on ideology: I, "Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence"; II, "Ideology has a material existence". The first thesis tenders the familiar Marxist contention that ideologies have the function of masking the exploitative arrangements on which class societies are based.
The second thesis posits that ideology does not exist in the form of "ideas" or conscious "representations" in the "minds" of individuals. Rather, ideology consists of the actions and behaviours of bodies governed by their disposition within material apparatuses. Central to the view of individuals as responsible subjects is the notion of an explanatory link between belief and action, that
For Althusser, this is yet another effect of social practice:
These material rituals may be compared with Bourdieu's concept of habitus. ISAs may also anticipate Foucault's disciplinary institutions which provide a critical rethinking of Althusser.
Althusser also recognized the role played by what he termed "Repressive State Apparatus". At times when individuals and groups pose a threat to the dominant order the state invokes Repressive State Apparatus. The most benign measures taken by the RSA are the systems of law and courts where putatively public contractual language is invoked in order to govern individual and collective behavior. As threats to the dominant order mount, the state turns to increasingly physical and severe measures: incarceration, police force and ultimately military intervention are used in response. In contrast to the ISAs, there is but one unified RSA.
